Gadget

After my Black Friday trip to the mall in Connecticut, I made another trip to the Westchester Mall in White Plains, NY. I was surprised to see the light customer turnout but this could have been because of the freezing rain and snow. Speaking of storms, I dropped by the Verizon Wireless store to take a look at another Storm from Blackberry.

As you recall, my last Storm experience was all wet. I am happy to say this Storm performed better than the last one I used in Connecticut.

While many of you were busy in the malls this past weekend or trying to find the best price on that new digital camera yesterday on Cyber Monday, the dedicated team of designers and programmers here at TMC worked day and night and night and day to bring you a new look and feel.

Over the past years, many of you have told me that you love to come to TMCnet on a daily basis and the hundreds of stories and blog entries we write on a daily basis contain everything you need to navigate the telecom and tech worlds. At the same time, many of you have told us the interface TMCnet has looks busy. Others have told me it is not clear that 50-100 writers contribute to TMCnet on a daily/weekly basis.

Our new redesign is meant to adress all of these great requests and we hope you enjoy the new TMCnet.

One last point... Thanks to the 2-3 million communications and technology decision makers who visit TMCnet monthly and thanks to the TMC team for doing such a great job on this redesign.

I have been swamped all morning just perusing all the Cyber Moday emails I have received from companies like Think Geek, Buy.com, Hello Direct, TigerDirect and more. It is truly amazing how low prices on electronics can go and one of the more interesting things I saw today is part of the new Geek Kids addition to the Think Geek website.

Items on this site range in suitability from newborn to 13 years of age and I am specifically interested in the Microcontroller Experimentation Kit which allows you to write programs and upload them to this device which has onboard sensors for light and temperature among other things. It also has a microphone, buzzer, diodes, resistors and more.

The product comes with a manual which has over 100 experiments and should be fascinating to play with. I wish I had one of these now when I was a kid.

Now that Linux is sort of up and running on the iPhone, what's next? Will we see Asterisk, MySQL and other open-source programs running in your pocket soon?

This is very interesting but remember that Apple devices are ultra-successful because of the user interface. It is unclear why we would want an iPhone or iPod touch which runs Linux -- other than for a variety of niche applications where useful software has already been written.

If there is one certainly it is that technology seems to evolve at a faster clip today than at any other time in our lifetimes. Moore's Law is part of this evolution but just as important is convergence. And by convergence I don't just mean voice and data. At this point it has become more than apparent that the every market is converging with one another.

Few products get the pre-hype associated with the Blackberry Storm - the first touch screen smartphone from Canada's RIM. The phone is similar to the iPhone in many ways and is designed to keep customers from defecting to the competing Apple device dubbed Jesus phone by some. In my humble estimation, there are millions of people in the US who would buy the iPhone if it worked on the Verizon network.

With the advent of the Storm, RIM and Verizon came together to offer what they hope is the equivalent of the iPhone but with the benefit of the Verizon Wireless network.

To determine how good this device is in the real world, I spent a good deal of time in a Verizon store and made camp near the single Blackberry Storm which the company had on display in the corner of the store in Fairfield County, Connecticut.

Big news out of China - it seems the world's second Android based phone will be from China and called the Zzzphone. A strike against the company is the name -- which virtually guarantees it will be listed last in any sort of alphabetical directory . On the bright side, it does have things going for it such as add-ons to support a full QWERTY keyboard, mini boom box, projector and more.

What is interesting is the thought that the Android OS and Google brand may be

strong enough to allow an army of companies to come out with Android phones.